Anthropological Life in Bush of Ghosts. Anthropology, Anthropologist and Cultural Change in Transitional Serbia

Celebrating centennial of Ethnology and Anthropology curriculum at the University of Belgrade in 2006 happened to be not just another occasion to speak about “glorious past”, or even to employ self-reflexivity to our discipline. Review of changes through which the discipline passed as the social and cultural circumstances have changed in Serbia in more than a century posed questions on how professional lives of anthropologists are affected by transitional occurrences of last twenty years or so, alongside with consequences for better understanding of Serbian society and its culture when knowledge is produced by those who live within that particular social and cultural context.It turns that if you want to understand what does transition really mean, or how social institutions, norms, or behaviours are affected by one social system ceasing to exist, while another is not fully established yet, and what does cultural change stand for in everyday life of common people around, you must have expert and whiteness in one person, the one confident in his/her own epistemic privilege, and yet capable to join professional efforts in trying to establish the discipline able enough to serve purposes of understanding and explaining the world we are living in, being the tool of cultural critique and conceptual frame for implementing social awareness at the same time. So in a manner of speaking anthropologist is produced somehow by the anthropology his/her professional work belongs to, where latter is shaped by social and cultural influences by the community which gives a contextual frame for whatever anthropology studies in certain social and cultural environment.